All gear will be scaled up to a minimum ilvl in PvP. This will be lower than even starting PvP gear.

Skirmishes will have rewards

Warlords will have three tiers of PvP gear

Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas will have the same base Conquest cap

Winning a Rated Battleground will allow you to use a bonus roll token for a shot at a piece of Gladiator’s gear, similar to the Celestial world bosses on the Timeless Isle.

Blizzard

War looms on the horizon, and although the Iron Horde poses a substantial threat to all of Azeroth, old grudges between the Alliance and the Horde are not so easily set aside. As Warlords of Draenor development continues, we wanted to share some exciting changes coming to PvP gear and how you’ll earn it in the expansion.

I’ve Got the Power!

In Mists of Pandaria we introduced the PvP Power stat, which allowed PvP gear to be functionally superior to raid and dungeon gear in PvP combat without exceeding the value of its equivalent PvE gear in PvE content. That was largely a success in instanced PvP Arenas and Battlegrounds, but we think we can do better—while also granting players those same benefits in outdoor world PvP. So, in Warlords of Draenor, we’re taking a different approach.

PvP gear in Warlords will no longer have PvP-specific stats. Instead, it will scale up to a higher item level as soon as you enter a designated PvP area, such as an Arena or Battleground, or as soon as you enter PvP combat anywhere else in the world. If you’re out questing with PvP gear, your items’ base item level will be used while fighting back the Iron Horde, but the second that raiding Druid tries to gank you, your higher PvP item level kicks in and you’ll have the upper hand. Each piece of PvP gear will have its PvP item level displayed clearly on its tooltip, so there’s no guesswork involved.

On top of that, all gear—even gear found in PvE content—will be scaled up to a certain minimum item level in any designated PvP area. That minimum is still lower than any of the actual PvP gear, but a fresh level-100 character who’s just wearing some dungeon gear, or even whatever they picked up while questing, will not be at quite as severe a disadvantage should they choose to step into a Skirmish or Random Battleground.

One added benefit of this new system is that most PvE gear will no longer need to be downscaled in PvP areas, as the equivalent PvP gear is already a higher item level in PvP situations. Instead of making players wearing PvE gear feel weaker in PvP, this makes it so players wearing PvP gear feel stronger. The only exception is Mythic raid gear. Mythic’s PvE item level and Conquest’s PvP item level are very close, so we’ll be downscaling Mythic gear slightly in designated PvP areas just to make sure that Conquest gear remains the best available for PvP.

What’s In the Box?!

The Warlords of Draenor expansion will also bring some major improvements to the way PvP gear is earned. For starters, we’re vastly improving the bonus rewards you can earn from doing Random or Call to Arms Battlegrounds. At the end of a match, you’ll earn a Bronze, Silver, or Gold Strongbox—or possibly all three. Which Strongboxes you earn depends on how well your team did in the match, but you can still earn them even if your team doesn’t win.

Take Warsong Gulch,for example. If your faction captured at least one flag before the game ended, you’ll get the Bronze Strongbox. Capture a second, and you’ll earn both the Bronze and Silver. And if you capture all three, not only do you win the game, but you’ll also earn all three Strongboxes. We’ll be restructuring the scoring of other Battlegrounds slightly (such as changing Arathi Basin to end at 1,500 points) so it’s easy to figure out what you need for each Strongbox.

Inside those Strongboxes could be any number of rewards: Honor points, Conquest points—even gear. Better Strongboxes can have better rewards, so even if your team is behind in the match, it’s worth keeping up the fight to try to earn the best reward you can.

Of course, Skirmishes (the unranked Arenas we announced a little while back) will have rewards as well. We’re still discussing exactly how we want to hand them out, but you’ll be able to earn gear and Honor by playing Skirmishes if you’d prefer.

A Veteran’s Honor

Another issue on our radar is the ever-increasing item level gap between the gear you can purchase with Honor and Conquest points. To help bridge that gap, in Warlords we’re going to have three separate tiers of PvP gear.

It starts with an introductory set of a quality similar to today’s Honor gear, except you’ll earn it much, much faster. That set comes primarily through the Strongboxes, and you’ve got a high chance of getting a piece in each Strongbox you earn. After that starter gear comes a new set: Veteran’s gear. There’s a small chance to find a piece of Veteran’s gear in a Silver or Gold Strongbox, but you can also purchase Veteran’s gear with Honor points. That gear’s PvP item level will be halfway between the starter gear and Gladiator’s gear.

Adding the Veteran’s tier accomplishes a lot of things for us. First, it helps make sure that someone who wants to step into rated PvP later on in the season isn’t nearly as far behind their opponents in gear. Second, since the basic gear is earned so quickly, that helps ensure players get those important set bonuses, trinkets, and so on without too much trouble, and helps put everyone on a decent baseline in their ability to compete. For players who enjoy PvP but aren’t really interested in jumping into rated competition, earning Veteran’s gear will feel a lot more rewarding.

As for Gladiator’s gear, we’ve been pretty happy with how Conquest points have worked in Season 15, but we are making one small change: Rated Battlegrounds and Arenas will have the same base Conquest cap. That cap can then be increased by your rating in either Arenas or Rated Battlegrounds (whichever is higher). Instead of giving you extra Conquest points, winning a Rated Battleground will allow you to use a bonus roll token for a shot at a piece of Gladiator’s gear, similar to the Celestial world bosses on the Timeless Isle. This tweak makes the weekly Conquest cap easier to understand, while still providing an extra incentive for running Rated Battlegrounds and letting you use your bonus rolls on PvP gear through PvP.

The Island

While these changes will bring some pretty exciting changes to World of Warcraft PvP, there’s still another major piece to this puzzle: Ashran. We’ll be sharing more details on what you can earn from Ashran soon. In the meantime, we look forward to seeing you on the battlefield!

Hit the break for Ion Hazzikostas' post on raid design, and the most recent patch 5.4.7 Hotfixes!

During the Garrosh Hellscream encounter, Eternal Flame no longer generates threat during stages 2 and 3 to address an issue that was making the encounter more difficult than intended for raid groups with Protection Paladin tanks.

Battlegrounds and Arenas

Matchmaking Ratings for Rated Battlegrounds has been increased by 100 for all players. Additional details for the change could be found in the forum thread titled: Rated Battleground MMR Hotfix.

UI

Resolved an issue where players continue to be listed on the Raid Browser after accepting an invite from someone in a Flexible difficulty raid.

Lead Game Designer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas on Raid Design: Part Two

Blizzard

Over the course of WoW’s nearly 10-year history, raiding has probably undergone more iteration and change than any other game system. To put the upcoming Warlords of Draenor raid changes into proper context, this three-part blog series will attempt to retrace the twists and turns of our raid design philosophy from Molten Core through Siege of Orgrimmar.

We continue the series by taking a look at raiding today, beginning with Cataclysm through Mists of Pandaria. If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.

Cataclysm (2010-2012)

After the rapid iteration on raid systems over the course of Wrath of the Lich King’s content updates, we approached Cataclysm aiming to wrap those designs into a more streamlined package. There were two major concerns that we wanted to address:

10-player raiding had grown very popular due to its accessibility, but we were increasingly hearing from many of those raiders that they felt like they didn’t have the opportunity to prove themselves on the hardest content or earn the best gear in the game.

Players often felt obligated to run both 10-player and 25-player modes of the same content each week in order to optimize their character, which could accelerate burnout. (Best-in-slot trinkets and other items on the unique 10-player loot tables didn’t help here.)

Guided by these concerns, we decided to consolidate 10-player and 25-player modes into a single difficulty, single reward tier, and single raid lockout. So in Cataclysm, we allowed raiders to choose their preferred raid size and experience the content as they saw fit.

While we were motivated by good intentions, these changes had some unfortunate side effects. . . .

The need for equal difficulty between the two modes meant that when we encountered organic imbalances (e.g. spreading out requires more coordination with more players in the same space), no longer could we err on the side of just letting 10-player be easier. We had to try to adjust numbers or other mechanics to offset the disparity, and that was a challenging problem that we lacked prior experience in solving, especially when tuning cutting-edge Heroic content. As a result, there were many differences between the two modes, particularly early in the expansion.

Unifying the difficulty of the two modes mainly involved increasing the difficulty of 10-player mode. This left many players who had enjoyed success in 10-player Normal Icecrown Citadel feeling unable to get any sort of foothold in Cataclysm raiding.

While in theory players could now choose their preferred mode of raiding, in reality equalizing rewards encouraged a persistent downward pressure on raid size: Growing from 10 to 25 was nearly impossible logistically, whereas challenging bosses or attendance woes continually tempted 25-player raids to downsize and just keep going with their 10 “best” players. Previously these temptations were offset by the fact that switching to 10-player mode yielded weaker loot and different achievements, but the Cataclysm changes removed that countervailing motivation.

We got better at balancing the two modes over the course of the expansion, but the social consequences of the change continued to reverberate. In particular, raiding had become inaccessible to players who previously had enjoyed playing with their friends or pickup groups, and that was a problem.

Patch 4.3: Raid Finder

Just as Dungeon Finder opened dungeons up to a far wider audience by removing the logistical barriers to finding groups for them, our new Raid Finder held the same promise for raiding. Whereas finding a pickup group even on an active realm required a large contiguous block of time and a fair bit of patience, Raid Finder allowed players to jump right in and experience raid content on their own time and according to their own schedules. The feature was tremendously popular, and it allowed more players than ever before to experience the conclusion of an expansion’s major story arc, as millions of players defeated Deathwing, compared to the thousands that had defeated Kel’thuzad back in 2006.

We learned a lot from Dragon Soul about how to design content for Raid Finder. We endeavored to preserve encounter mechanics where possible, but had to significantly adjust unforgiving abilities—especially those that allowed a single player’s mistake to result in the entire group’s failure. In traditional organized raiding, a group of players generally learns from mistakes and masters content together, and they bring that collective knowledge with them in subsequent weeks. In Raid Finder, which put players in random groups each week, there was a clean slate with regard to mastery of the encounters. Having to essentially redo progression each week is few players’ idea of fun, so we had to significantly accelerate the Raid Finder learning curve.

Mists of Pandaria (2012-2014)

Going into Mists of Pandaria (Mists), we made fewer changes to our raid structure than in any prior expansion. Other than some improved handling of loot for Raid Finder (replacing traditional Need/Greed with personal loot), Mists raiding at launch followed the exact same structure as raiding in Patch 4.3: Dragon Soul. In retrospect, the lack of change actually reflects another miscalculation on our part.

We knew that the Cataclysm changes had effectively removed a difficulty level from our game by raising the challenge of 10-player Normal to match 25-player, and that this change had left a group of players without suitable raid content. By adding Raid Finder, we had returned to three effective difficulties, and given the popularity of the feature, we assumed that this largely solved the problem. We were mistaken.

Raid Difficulty and Raid Groups—An Aside

In broad strokes, there are three distinct types of groups that participate in organized raiding:

Friends and Family groups: These are social groups that exist for reasons besides raiding, but whose players would like to venture into raid content together. This type of group is inherently inclusive, and will not organize its roster according to specific class needs, nor is the group likely to criticize or remove players based on performance. Members of this type of group prioritize playing together.

Raiding guilds: These are groups that have formed for the purpose of raiding. These are the majority of guilds that you’ll see recruiting in Trade chat or on realm forums. These groups will generally look for specific classes based on roster needs, and will expect a certain level of attendance or performance. Members of this type of group prioritize experiencing and learning the content.

Hardcore raiding guilds: An extreme subset of the previous category, these are the guilds of players whose ethos drives them to be the best at games they play, and who are willing to dedicate time and energy to maximize their results. Guilds of this type will recruit and maintain a roster based primarily on performance, and will expect raiders to optimize their characters. Members of this type of group prioritize competition and success.

At the start of Mists, Normal modes appealed solidly to raiding guilds, and Heroic difficulty provided a worthy challenge to the hardcore guilds. However, friends-and-family groups—which had once thrived in Karazhan and in 10-player Normal raiding in Wrath—were left without much satisfying content. They made some headway in the new raids, but often got stuck at Elegon (Mogu’shan Vaults) or Garalon (Heart of Fear) without any clear way forward. Running Raid Finder could have helped them get better gear to overcome these challenges, but that often simply wasn’t enjoyable. For the player who just wants to play with his or her friends in a tight-knit environment, solo-queuing was not a satisfying experience; even queuing for Raid Finder as a group wasn’t much better, since the presence of a dozen or more strangers transformed the nature of the activity. Besides, Raid Finder was tuned for randomly matched groups and generally lacked sufficient challenge for even the most casual of organized raid groups.

We realized that we were doing a poor job of serving this important segment of our player community. Raid Finder, it turned out, was great for players who had no interest or ability to participate in organized raiding at scheduled times, but for friends-and-family groups, it was not an adequate substitute for the old 10-player Normal difficulty that went away in Cataclysm.

Patch 5.4: Flexible Raiding

For the Siege of Orgrimmar, we introduced a new raiding mode that was designed primarily to solve this problem: Flexible Raid mode was tuned to be roughly 20% to 25% easier (numerically speaking) than Normal mode, while preserving all of the fight mechanics, but more importantly, it also made use of a new scaling system to allow the content to adapt to any raid size between 10 and 25 players. For players whose priority is just being able to raid with their friends, why force someone to have exactly 9 or 24 friends? Why limit which friends they can play with to those on the same realm? We made Flexible Raids have their own lockout, and we allowed players to kill the same boss multiple times per week—but only loot it once. In general, our aim was to remove as many obstacles as possible that might get in the way of friends who just want to be able to raid together in WoW. (And for those who are wondering, “Then why not allow cross-faction raiding? Why not let me raid with my Alliance friends even if I play Undead?” Fundamentally, Alliance vs. Horde, Orcs vs. Humans, is the heart and soul of the Warcraft universe—we have to draw the line somewhere, and we draw it there.)

We’re tremendously happy with how players have received the new Flexible Raid mode, and we wish we’d implemented something like this sooner. We’re now back to three tiers of difficulty that cover all of the different kinds of organized raiders, while preserving Raid Finder for those who just want to experience the content on their own schedule.

Comments

Comment by stym

on 2014/04/29 12:55:38

I think that even with the "experience raid content on your own schedule" argument, Raid Finder got also severely weakened by addons like oqueue.With oqueue, it can be actually faster to find a Flex raiding segment than to queue for Raid Finder.In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard promised us an integrated tool similar to oqueue (minus the bugs and constant upgrades required), and I think Normal Raiding (the equivalent of today's Flex difficulty) is going to become the norm, with Raid Finder a very marginal tool used only to gear up for Heroic Dungeons.

All in all, great changes and I can't wait for WoD's raiding content.

Comment by Maurvyn

on 2014/04/29 13:32:23

While I started raiding in Wrath with one of the "Raiding Guild" segments, and ran LFR as much as I could stomach through Cata, I now consider myself part of the "Friends/Family" grouping, and I still find myself left out of a majority of the content. Currently, I only play with small group. All of the friends/guildies/etc. that we have played with over the years have moved on; either out of game, to other games, or to more dedicated raiding teams. Our little group of Four to six friends and family is all we have. We only play a few hours a week, and have wildly varying skill levels. One girl is in a rural area with very slow internet, and large raids are out-of-the-question-laggy. Another is a true duffer and really only enjoys the battle pets, because every time she's run a dungeon the people are awful to her. We have tried other guilds, only to run into "family" guilds that are abusive and wannabe "hardcore"; "hardcore" disguised as "friendly", which they aren't; or social guilds that run no content whatsoever and only exist as a sort of loose collective who are only in it for the guild perks. We are sort of left out. There is no way for us to experience current content that does not involve exposing ourselves to the deplorable cesspool of nasty that is LFR/LFD. People call LFR "tourist mode" because it is too easy. I say take the Flex one step further. I would pay double my current sub to have a real "tourist mode". Allow the Flex to scale down to four. Let me see the content - the stories, the events, the action- with the people I like playing with, without forcing me to play with horrible people with whom I have no desire to interact. I don't even care about the loot. Make the loot equivalent to quest greens and blues. I don't care. Why do I need Epic loot when I am not raiding heroic content? I am not doing anything epic to earn it, I don't deserve epic gear.It doesn't effect anyone else. People can still have their epic and heroic achievements and gear that they work so hard for; I just want to play a video game on my off time with my family and friends. I think the rest of us would like to have a vehicle to see the content for which we pay the exact same fees as everybody else.

/whine

TL;DR - QQ why don't they design the game just for my friends and family :P

Comment by Bundletif

on 2014/04/29 14:05:57

LFR provided an incentive for me to raid. To get better gear than heroic dungeons, I tried it and loved it. It became my endgame. I would prefer the gear levels would stay similar to keep my interest, but it doesn't look like that is the case. Hopefully the beta will provide me the opportunity to see what other ways will be created that will fill that space.

Comment by Interest

on 2014/04/29 16:15:33

Elder Lin and Elder Liao now have significantly more health. Elder Lin and Elder Liao will now respawn much more quickly.

Lol I wonder if some people have been having some PvP fun.

Comment by Rankkor

on 2014/04/29 16:56:14

(And for those who are wondering, “Then why not allow cross-faction raiding? Why not let me raid with my Alliance friends even if I play Undead?” Fundamentally, Alliance vs. Horde, Orcs vs. Humans, is the heart and soul of the Warcraft universe—we have to draw the line somewhere, and we draw it there.)

awwww D=

So much for that hope.

Comment by Interest

on 2014/04/29 19:31:50

Well sadly it makes sense, as much as I want to raid with a bunch of Alliance buddies.

On another note I wish they'd do more about decreasing or outright axing the prices of realm and faction changes.

Comment by Azrile

on 2014/04/29 20:20:07

I think that even with the "experience raid content on your own schedule" argument, Raid Finder got also severely weakened by addons like oqueue.With oqueue, it can be actually faster to find a Flex raiding segment than to queue for Raid Finder.In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard promised us an integrated tool similar to oqueue (minus the bugs and constant upgrades required), and I think Normal Raiding (the equivalent of today's Flex difficulty) is going to become the norm, with Raid Finder a very marginal tool used only to gear up for Heroic Dungeons.

All in all, great changes and I can't wait for WoD's raiding content.

The problem with Oqueque and with the new tool from Blizzard is that they still require a leader, and that leader is free to set any requirements they want and to be a total ass. Two things are going to continue to happen that will keep LFR relevant for a lot of players. The first is that people will, and always have, set crazy ilvl requirements for PUGs. I tanked Flex the first week it was available at ilvl 502 and we cleared 4 bosses in an hour with no wipes. Look at Flex1 gear requirements in Oqueue right now.. my guess is you won´t find any under 525ish and probably would have to wait to find one under 535.

Then there are just idiot leaders. I had one a few months ago ( again, oqueue). here is what he thought was funny. the lowest dps got kicked after each boss without him saying a word. It took 3 bosses until people figured it out. None of the dps were really low, and we were downing bosses easily.

then you are going to have the added problem in WoD where the first level of flex ( normal I guess we call it now) is going to default to need/greed or master looter or whatever. The person who sets up the group can determine, and I am guessing not a lot of them are going to pick personal loot. Which means now you have to worry about rolling against the raid leader or his guildmates. Again, this type of drama is one of the good things about LFR.

But you will say ´then just set up your own group´.. and that is fine. I already run Openraid groups all the time. But the average LFR user is not going to want to get into all that and deal with leadership issues, again, that is one of the draws of LFR.. you can just be a cog in the machine.

Comment by mudbreath

on 2014/04/29 23:41:51

Gear scaling for PVE and PVP gear looks like a great idea. I hope it is as good as it looks in the notes. Also getting personal rewards for doing well in battlegrounds is a great idea. There are times when the other faction gets off to a quick start and people bail. Then those who stay quit. Giving people incentive to rally and keep trying could result in some epic come backs. I like these changes and I am excited to see them live.

Comment by tankform

on 2014/04/30 05:21:06

I'd rather have the LFR / Flex lootsystem with a small change.. make the items tradeable, there are many items I get and don't need and vice versa. If you could just trade the items you get within the group I believe all would be happy :)

Comment by wrongheaded

on 2014/05/01 06:49:23

While I started raiding in Wrath with one of the "Raiding Guild" segments, and ran LFR as much as I could stomach through Cata, I now consider myself part of the "Friends/Family" grouping, and I still find myself left out of a majority of the content. Currently, I only play with small group. All of the friends/guildies/etc. that we have played with over the years have moved on; either out of game, to other games, or to more dedicated raiding teams. Our little group of Four to six friends and family is all we have. We only play a few hours a week, and have wildly varying skill levels. One girl is in a rural area with very slow internet, and large raids are out-of-the-question-laggy. Another is a true duffer and really only enjoys the battle pets, because every time she's run a dungeon the people are awful to her. We have tried other guilds, only to run into "family" guilds that are abusive and wannabe "hardcore"; "hardcore" disguised as "friendly", which they aren't; or social guilds that run no content whatsoever and only exist as a sort of loose collective who are only in it for the guild perks. We are sort of left out. There is no way for us to experience current content that does not involve exposing ourselves to the deplorable cesspool of nasty that is LFR/LFD. People call LFR "tourist mode" because it is too easy. I say take the Flex one step further. I would pay double my current sub to have a real "tourist mode". Allow the Flex to scale down to four. Let me see the content - the stories, the events, the action- with the people I like playing with, without forcing me to play with horrible people with whom I have no desire to interact. I don't even care about the loot. Make the loot equivalent to quest greens and blues. I don't care. Why do I need Epic loot when I am not raiding heroic content? I am not doing anything epic to earn it, I don't deserve epic gear.It doesn't effect anyone else. People can still have their epic and heroic achievements and gear that they work so hard for; I just want to play a video game on my off time with my family and friends. I think the rest of us would like to have a vehicle to see the content for which we pay the exact same fees as everybody else.

/whine

TL;DR - QQ why don't they design the game just for my friends and family :P

I'd go one step further and say they should let the content scale to anywhere from one to forty players. If someone wants to breeze through a watered-down version of SoO on their own that's fine by me, just like it doesn't bother me if someone wants to do a super-hardcore version of it. I like LFR and flex/normal because I play WoW for fun, not for a challenge, but I don't see why everyone should have to play the same way I do.

Comment by Dbase

on 2014/05/01 22:53:19

PvP:I don't PvP a ton; but when I do, I feel I don't have the freedom to do it on just any of my characters. If I spread it out, I'll never amass enough Honor, etc needed to buy better pvp gear. I have to pick one character for pvp, to concentrate my points in one place.I hope that the new systems help to loosen this restriction.

Comment by VictorB

on 2014/05/02 11:22:41

I don't know how many people there are like me, but I have never been part of raiding (and I've even played since classic). It attracts the most loathsome part of the community and every time I've attempted it, I've been thrust out by unruly and vile pick up groups or otherwise. I understand some groups get to enjoy it and do well at it, and that's fine for them, but to me raiding really seems like something only a minority can truly experience.

Does anyone else share the belief that WoW should integrate the gear treadmill into something other than raiding? Why is raiding so important? Sure, it's a big game with lots of people - but that doesn't necessarily mean the raid format is the way to go. I'm sure Blizzard could create something far more entertaining and accessible by the majority of players. The encounters in raids are thoroughly entertaining, the players we're forced to accompany to engage in said encounters however are not. I ask: who has nine friends to run about with? Nine close, genuine friends at least. I do outside of the game, sure, but I don't in game, and even if I did I'd have to organise a date and time and they'd actually all have to be there. Raiding simply isn't possible without outsiders and unfortunately it serves more as a gateway to meeting the most foul and contemptible people playing the game rather than WoW's exciting endgame.

Edit: Alternatively, they could just edit the current raid structure to be for any number of people. Difficult, sure, but far more accessible and thereby enjoyable for most players, surely.

Comment by PragmaticSoul

on 2014/05/02 17:30:32

Does anyone else share the belief that WoW should integrate the gear treadmill into something other than raiding?

I've thought that they should implement a universal "not raiding" currency for buying out-of-date ilvls of gear.

Like pet battling? You get 2 coins for every evenly-matched battle (i.e., you have a team of three pets of the right level range for a zone) that you win.

Like grinding rep? You get 1% of rep gains (pre-bonuses) as coins.

That sort of thing.

Then spend the coins to buy gear that's a couple of tiers behind current raid gear (but without the tier bonuses, and what the heck, have it be green font instead of purple). Raiders keep their special toys and their "elite"/exclusive gear look, but non-raiders and other casuals get some gear progression.

Edit: Alternatively, they could just edit the current raid structure to be for any number of people. Difficult, sure, but far more accessible and thereby enjoyable for most players, surely.

The new "Looking for Group" tool that's coming out should help. You can get a few friends, act as raid leader, get some others to join up, and if the strangers turn out to be jerks, you can kick them to the curb. You can (I think I've read?) even set the loot to, for instance, personal loot (so everyone rolls on their own loot table--so no drama over who gets what). Those who work out, get put on your friend list, to be invited to the next raid.

Comment by syxkees

on 2014/05/03 21:52:15

This is what I gather from reading the thread:

LFR/LFD is full of horrible people. Well, duh. LFR contains players who don't play well with others, or they'd be in some kind of guild. There's a guild on every server for every playstyle. If you don't want to get into a pug full of people who are learning their role in a raid setting and are in the process of learning the fights, or whose personalities are so intolerable that they can't find friends to play with, don't use LFR.

This "new" flex system is just a partial return to early 1.0, when any instance could be entered by any number of people. However, you can't ask the devs to figure out a tuning scale that accomodates group sizes from solo to 40. You would eliminate mechanics that differentiate raids from dungeons because certain encounter effects (like main tank debuffs or MC) would make successful completion next to impossible for small groups or solo (like Kael'thas in TK), and the removal of these kinds of mechanics will make fights incredibly boring for large groups who just tank and spank a boss for 6 minutes that simply has more health because there are more people in the room.

The answer to this problem is 5-man content, a tier of content that seems to be completely forgotten about by the player base. It used to was that if you couldn't get 10 people together on a regular basis or you didn't want to spam trade to fill the holes in your roster, you took 4 of your peeps and DID HEROIC DUNGEONS. If a 6th guy was online, you rotated him in. BC was definitely the heyday of heroic dungeons. They were fun, unique, well-tuned, and granted access to rewards that felt appropriately powered for their position in content progression. I feel this tier of play was completely missing from MoP and should come back. The new structure would go something much like this: hit level cap, normal dungeons<LFR<flex<=heroic dungeons<normal raid<heroic raid. The people who want/use LFR and flex don't care about having the biggest numbers, they just want to play the game. Give them a detuned version of the raid. Some people, one of whom is me, want to do something that feels challenging and epic but don't have time to raid aggressively or seriously (anymore). Give us really hard 5 man content. Some people hate dungeons and just want to raid. Make flex and heroic dungeons separate but equal entry points to normal raids.

Option A: Gear currency (honor, justice, conquest, valor) is all screwed up right now. dungeon->heroic dungeon and LFR->flex content need to be on parallel tracks that lead up to raiding. In my model, normal dungeons get you the blues to start heroics or flex. LFR gives you slightly higher powered blues to start heroics or flex. Both of these reward justice to buy gear to fill in the gaps left by stubborn drops. Flex gives you epics to start raiding with and valor to fill in the gaps. Heroics give you less powerful epics than flex to make doing heroics easier, and heroics reward valor to buy the EXACT same pre-raid gear you get from flex. This puts everyone who wants to go past toddler-tuned raids and hardcore 5 mans at the same starting power. You just have a choice in how you get there. Leave normal raids challenging and heroic raids incredibly challenging for the people the content is intended for.

Option B: make everything flex. Allow all content to be done by a group of 3 to 40. The more people in the group, the more abilities and mechanics are activated. Reward gear at item levels that increase proportionately to encounter difficulty. Allow the difficulty level to scale in real time: 3-6 players, dungeon difficulty. 7-12 players, lfr difficulty. 13-21, heroic dungeon difficulty. 22-30 players, normal raid difficulty. 31+, heroic raid difficulty. And for the fun of it, exactly 40, nightmare mode. This way, everyone gets to see everything.

My last point is about loot. People don't want to get stuck with stuff they don't want, and they don't want to have to roll against teammates (or LFR dbags) to win drops. Everybody wants to hand off items they don't need to other people in their raid ID, so let them. The ability to extend such a kindness would go incredibly far to countering the overwhelming prevalence of bad feels in LFR/D. To be completely fair, we have to make a concession and use the current need/greed roll system to recycle the loot. Give players a 2 min window to put unwanted personal loot into a pool for people in the same raid of the appropriate armor type and spec, and let them roll on it. That way, the player giving the loot back to the raid is not burdened with choosing who gets it. It becomes available to everyone who can use it. The 2 min window prevents people from having to stand around next to a boss corpse for 20 mins waiting to see if any loot will be recycled. Give players some form of low-impact reward for recycling loot, like a bit of valor or gold, or even a personal loot reroll token. You may spend this token to roll again for loot in Siege of Crossroads. "Good trade." - Tonto

Thoughts?

Comment by Dilbo

on 2014/10/13 16:43:44

Not really digging the PvP gear scaling stuff because on a fundamental level the act of scaling devalues gear. If I get an iLvL 600 piece it should be just that - no more and no less. Gear variety would have been a better use of dev resources, which means you can let players do pvp-related quest lines to obtain specific items that enable unique enhancements or abilities. An example would be a weapon that buffs your main damage/defense ability by giving it an improvement that is particularly useful in pvp. They could have the same types of quests for people who prefer pve gear.

For raids, instead of "tuning" them for a mob of players, why not tune them for multiple groups of 5 players? That way you could have raids that require small groups to split up and complete objectives simultaneously and independently before regrouping for a final showdown, and instead of one "right way" to complete the raid, there could be several possible solutions each with their own set of pros/cons. The variations in solving raid challenges would not only make it more fun to do the same raid multiple times, but it could also become an objective for a quest line as mentioned in the first paragraph.

Raid bosses could move away from being a single NPC to something more dynamic, like a group of enemy NPCs with more sophisticated AI that attempt to hinder your progress thru the raid (unpredictably to the players, and based on what the players are doing) as you play it rather than simply being the last stop before the station. The improved AI could have the enemies finding your group's weak point and attempting to exploit it rather than predictably focusing on the tank.

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